Ten 4-year PhD positions in clinical vision and neuroscience

Glaucoma is the most common age-related neurodegenerative eye-disease in western society and one of the four major blinding eye diseases worldwide.The classic view of glaucoma is that of an eye disease in which an elevated intraocular pressure damages the retinal nerve cells mechanically, initially resulting in visual field loss, and ultimately in blindness. However, recent insights indicate that the classic view is far too simplistic: rather than a disease restricted to the eye, glaucoma involves both intraocular pressure and intracranial pressure and damages neural tissue in both the eye and the brain.With this in mind, EGRET focuses on three key research topics:1) Improving functional tests: current functional tests assume a straightforward relationship between the number of surviving retinal ganglion cells and visual sensitivity. This is most likely too simplistic. We…